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Monday, January 4, 2010

Uganda Gay Death Bill : more on the American Connection

Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived ... in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior. ...

And now they are shocked, shocked, that the Ugandans are proposing death. Oh no! We didn't mean that! Some of our best friends are gay! (yes, they really say that).

Human rights advocates in Uganda say the visit by the three Americans helped set in motion what could be a very dangerous cycle. Gay Ugandans already describe a world of beatings, blackmail, death threats like “Die Sodomite!” scrawled on their homes, constant harassment and even so-called correctional rape.

“Now we really have to go undercover,” said Stosh Mugisha, a gay rights activist who said she was pinned down in a guava orchard and raped by a farmhand who wanted to cure her of her attraction to girls. ...

“What these people have done is set the fire they can’t quench,” said the Rev. Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian who went undercover for six months to chronicle the relationship between the African anti-homosexual movement and American evangelicals.

We've talked about Rev. Kaoma before, and the revelations linking this horrible bill to American evangelicals in government, especially the murky C-street cult, in some detail here.

In iraq, religious leaders are silent, or even endorse brutal, sickening torture and murder of gay people. Now in Uganda, there's a positive blood-lust, driven by American fundamentalists who call GLBT people "evil", "hidden", "dark". They didn't say a thing about this bill as long as it wasn't officially noticed, which means they see nothing wrong with murdering people for the crime of whom they love. You know perfectly well these sexual obsessives would like to see GLBT people imprisoned and executed in this country too.

Is it different really from a Vatican that calls GLBT people "objectively disordered" and our relationships a "intrinsic moral evil"? Remember the Vatican would not sign on to a UN resolution against criminalization of homosexuality, ostensibly because to do so would support gay marriage. I call it their "better dead than wed" policy. And of course they oppose condom usage as a means to fight HIV, arguing that condoms increase the disease.

This language is the same used to de-humanize despise minorities throughout history: whether used against gays by straights, Tutsis by Hutus, or against Jews by Nazis. And they claim they are doing it in the name of religion.

Let us remember that many faith groups oppose this abuse. Why is it their rights and voices are ignored?

For shame.

Update: Scott Lively in this video describes this law as a "nuclear bomb" against gays. Suuuuure he's surprised by it. As noted by Andrew Sullivan,

here's a video of Lively's talk in Uganda that reveals what he says when he doesn't think he's being watched by Americans. He likens gays to mass killers, as the kind of people who would create a holocaust, as terrible dangers to civilization. This is the core of the Christianist message and the Christianist message is now the core of the GOP. At some point, you have to take these people's words seriously.